Cross-Regional Highway Built through a City Centre as an Example of the Sustainable Development of Urban Transport

Magdalena Żak and Anna Mainka
Additional contact information
Magdalena Żak: Department of Air Protection, Faculty of Energy and Environmental Engineering, Silesian University of Technology, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland
Anna Mainka: Department of Air Protection, Faculty of Energy and Environmental Engineering, Silesian University of Technology, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 24, 1-17

Abstract: Sustainable development requires ensuring the mobility of residents and must not cause deterioration of the quality of the environment in the selected area. The purpose of this study is to verify if the construction of a cross-regional highway through the city centre affected air quality in the neighbourhood of a newly built road. Air quality was assessed based on measurements of concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, which is considered to be typical for automotive sources air pollution. The spectrophotometric method with passive sampling was used in the 24 h NO 2 measurements. The calculated mean NO 2 concentrations in the periods before and after road construction were within the ranges of 23.2–31.9 μg/m 3 and 22.3–28.9 μg/m 3 , respectively. The relative NO 2 concentrations determined in the study for 10 out of 11 sampling points were lower than the unity, including 5 points markedly lower (0.82–0.89). The obtained results indicate that the construction of the new artery by the city centre, using appropriate technical solutions and traffic organization (tunnel, noise barriers, roundabouts, speed limit) likely contributed to an overall reduction in NO 2 concentrations. The presented solution may serve as an example for other cities struggling with problems of low air quality associated with inefficient transportation systems.

Keywords: road transport; cross-regional highway; transport pollutants; nitrogen dioxide (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/24/10403/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/24/10403/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:24:p:10403-:d:461131

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().